The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve a notion that I’m going to be able to use that to get somewhere with Lucas Calverte. When I cheerfully call him Luke, I’ve an idea that I may learn at last, in the words of Michael Meadowcraft, who killed the preacher. Or, at the very least I’ll bring back to his mind just what did happen that night at the Imperial Hotel.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Harriet abandoned her customary late Sunday morning visit to the croissant shop in Aslough Parade in favour of waiting, as she had said to Pip the evening before, ‘till our former Undersheriff has been to church and heard an improving sermon. Then when he’s been, for a change, on the wrong end of a bit of preaching he may be rather more ready to tell the truth.’

  But before setting off for Westholme and hopefully sermon-bettered Lucas Calverte she went into Headquarters, where poor Pip had been consigned to wait in case there were any demands from Mr Newcomen to be fended off. There she begged for some expert knowledge.

  ‘Just as I was dropping off to sleep last night,’ she said, ‘I hit on what we used to call when I was at school a wheeze.’

  ‘A wheeze? I know what that is, however long ago it was that people used to use the word. But what wheeze is it? And why do you need one?’

  ‘Right, Answer One: I think I may need my wheeze if the old gasbag hasn’t taken in what the vicar’s going to preach to him. The usual stuff about always speaking the truth, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, I see that a sermon might not be enough to make an old hypocrite like Lucas Calverte come out with the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But how’s your wheeze going to make him cough up? What’s your Answer Two?’

  ‘Simple. If dodgy. Let me tell you something. Right at the beginning of this business I thought I ought to go along and see the scene of the crime before the bulldozer and the wrecking ball knocked the Imperial Hotel flat. And it was when I came out of that extraordinary ballroom — I wish you’d seen it, Pip, walls all covered from the floor right up to that great glass roof with mad tile-pictures of luscious nymphs and lusty gods, with twisty pillars in yellow and blue all writhed round with a wild tangling of every sort of flower and foliage — it was when I came out of there, still not convinced that anybody ought to be re-opening such a long-ago case, that I encountered little plump Mr Popham, who used to be the hotel’s general manager and is now the caretaker, if he’s still there at all. And he was smoking what I imagine was some pretty cheap sort of cigarette. But the smell of that smoke, very much like the Woodbines they used to puff at thirty-odd years ago, took me back in one single instant to those days. And then I felt that, yes, this was my case and I was going to pursue it to the end.’

  Pip’s little blue eyes were sparkling.

  ‘And you’re going to try the same thing on Lucas Calverte?’ he said. ‘To make him actually confess?’

  Then a look of blank dismay overcame him.

  ‘But — But, ma’am. You don’t smoke.’

  ‘No, Pip, I don’t. I haven’t since I had an illicit fag behind the school pavilion, the pawy, and was caught there and sent up to the headmistress. The dressing down I got — irresponsibility, unladylike behaviour, setting a bad example — was enough to cure me of smoking for the rest of my life. Well, almost. Because I did take it up for a month or two when I was first in the Met and wanted to act like one of the boys. But that didn’t last.’

  ‘Wish I had your strength of will, ma’am.’

  ‘Right. But I can understand why you need something like that, which, thank goodness, I don’t. And it’s a very good thing now that you are a smoker. Because I want you to lend me the wherewithal. It may or may not get a confession out of that old humbug. But, if we’re wrong about him, which we well may be, then at least, if all goes according to plan, he will tell me what he actually saw in the foyer that night.’

  *

  Harriet, once Lucas Calverte had settled himself in the sagging cretonne-covered armchair in his study, jumped up from the equally sagging sofa on which he had placed her. She stood looking down at him.

  ‘Mr Calverte,’ she said, ‘I have visited you twice before now, and on each occasion you have told me you can remember nothing of the events of the evening of May the twenty-second, 1969. Can you do rather better now?’

  Calverte looked back at her, eyes filled with sudden anger.

  ‘Superintendent, what is the meaning of this? I told you distinctly before. That whole terrible evening has been mercifully blotted from my mind. Why should you think it should suddenly cease to be so?’

  ‘Frankly, sir, I did not expect any other answer now. But I thought it only fair to give you the opportunity to — To, shall we say, remember what happened again now.’

  ‘Superintendent.’ He made an effort to get up out of the deep armchair. ‘Superintendent, I think this conversation has gone far enough. I have yet to meet your new Chief Constable, and I would very much dislike having to see him for the first time in order to make a complaint about one of his senior officers. But if necessary I shall do that. I hope you understand.’

  ‘I do understand. All too well. However — ’

  She left a long pause, all the better to emphasize her next two words.

  ‘Luke Calvert, I am going to ask you once more. What did you see, or do, that evening at the Imperial Hotel?’

  Now Lucas Calverte, Luke Calvert, sank slowly back into his flower-patterned chair.

  ‘How — Why — How did you know?’ he asked, actually broken-voiced.

  ‘I went out yesterday to Gralethorpe, and saw an old lady who, I understand, is a cousin of yours.’

  ‘Abigail. Damn her.’

  ‘Mr Calverte. What you have chosen to call yourself these many years is no business of mine. But, let me say, I shall not hesitate to tell what I have learnt to whomever I care to. That is, if I think that you are holding back from me events which I am entitled to know about.’

  ‘But — But what if I can’t remember? Really can’t remember. It was thirty years ago, and — And I did not want to have to think about that evening any more than I had to. So, yes, I deliberately put it out of my mind. And now ... Now, really, I can remember very little of it, if anything.’

  Harriet looked at him. A humbled and confused man.

  ‘You still tell me that?’ she said. ‘That you cannot remember that evening thirty years ago?’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. I blotted it out. You must believe me, you must.’

  With a sigh, Harriet took from her pale fawn bag, matching the tussore summer suit she had carefully chosen to wear this Sunday morning, the half-empty pack of Royals Pip had lent her. His lighter followed.

  A little awkwardly — she would have been the first to admit it — she pulled out one of the cigarettes, put it between her lips, flicked once, twice, a third time and a fourth at the lighter’s wheel, and at last put flame to tip. She sucked in a mouthful of smoke that all but set her choking, and then expelled it. Not quite into Calverte’s face, but near enough.

  ‘Miss Martens, I wish you — ’

  There were smoke-tears in his eyes. He blinked to rid himself of them.

  Harriet sucked in, puffed out again.

  ‘Mr Calv — ‘ she began.

  And realized speaking was made difficult with a cigarette clamped between her lips. She snatched it away.

  ‘Mr Calverte, I am asking you once again, what happened in the ballroom foyer there at the Imperial?’

  ‘I tell you — ’

  Now the harsh tobacco smoke, as Harriet hastily managed another puff, sent a splutter of coughing up from Lucas Calverte’s unaccustomed lungs.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he said, tears at the edge of his voice. ‘I blotted it — No, wait. That evening ... That terrible, terrible moment. Now I can see it. Yes, see it all.’

  A tremendous gulp. Harriet saw the Adam’s apple in the old man’s stringy throat heave and shift.

  And she thought — words b
eat out in her head — It’s working. It’s working, my wheeze. My absurd wheeze that came to me on the edge of sleep last night. That whiff, as near as I could get it, of the old coarse cigarette days of the sixties, the end of the Woodbine days. It’s working. Lucas Calverte is going to come out with it all.

  But what he said was not what she had expected to hear.

  ‘It was the end of my life,’ he croaked out.

  What? What’s this?

  ‘I — I was sitting waiting on that round bench with the big pot of pampas grass in the middle, on the far side from the ballroom. Waiting for my dear Boy who had changed my life, for my dear Boy to emerge when he felt himself ready, and — And I heard that loud screech one of those doors made when it was opened too quickly. I turned round. I thought it would be him, coming out. But it wasn’t. It was that dreadful Bubsy Willson.’

  Bubsy. Harriet pounced now. So it had been Bubsy after all who went into the ballroom. It was Bubsy who walked along the aisle made by those little red plush chairs, past those fantastic tile-pictures, those foliage-wreathed columns, and —

  But Lucas Calverte was going on, seeing it all again.

  ‘I remember, I remember. I had had time to think after I saw her come out. I thought, She looks uglier than ever. And then she lifted up her head and shouted. She shouted out, yelled or screamed out, that the Boy was dead. My Krishna.’

  Another dreadful gulp, a fighting for mere breath.

  ‘Dead,’ the old man said again. And I knew then, I knew at once, that I was dead, too. All that I had come to live for, the — The chance to do some real good with my life, through his life, the Boy’s life, had gone. I knew then in one instant that the real me, Luke, Luke — Luke was dead. Only the waxwork was still there, the waxwork I had taken so long to make and form, the image of the good man, the Undersheriff, the one who knew always what was for the best, and would tell people what it was. He was back with me. Back with me for ever.’

  He came to a halt.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Calverte,’ Harriet said.

  She could think of nothing more to add.

  *

  Pip Steadman was delighted to hear of the success of Harriet’s wheeze, such as it was.

  ‘I must admit, ma’am,’ he said, ‘I never thought it would come off. I mean ... Well, it seemed to be — Well, almost ridiculous.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have said anything other than ridiculous if you’d seen the way I went about attempting to smoke in the old gasbag’s face. Unless you’d said farcical.’

  ‘But it came off, ma’am. It came off.’

  ‘It did, Pip. In its way. But just think where it’s led us. It looks — ’

  The ring, ring, ringing of the phone on the table beside her brought her to an enforced halt.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. It’ll be bloody Mr — It’ll be the Chief. You’d better answer it, Pip.’

  Pip picked up.

  But the quacking voice Harriet could hear was clearly not Mr Newbroom’s.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Pip said. ‘She’s here. Detective Superintendent Martens is here.’

  He handed the phone to Harriet.

  ‘It’s Mr Sydney Aslough, the girl said.’

  ‘Sydney. Then you haven’t run off to Europe?’

  ‘Hey, you thought I had,’ Aslough’s voice came happily back. ‘You believed old Syd had done a bunk thinking he’d got the law treading on his tail after all this time. You know, I hoped you’d got a better opinion of me.’

  Harriet felt a wave of shame. Which turned in an instant to warmth.

  ‘No, Syd,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what made me have some momentary doubts when I heard from your secretary you’d gone to what she called the Continent. But I certainly should have known better.’

  ‘So you bloody well should. I might sell a dodgy vehicle, get the chance. But I wouldn’t never have harmed a hair of that Boy’s head. Sydney Aslough knows real goodness when he sees it. Which is almost never.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. From all I’ve heard and read about the Boy, real goodness is what he had.’

  ‘So you going to find out who it was? Who went in there, to that crazy ballroom, and did in the poor little sod?’

  ‘I am. I think I am.’

  ‘And was it something to do with why you called me when I was away in old Deutschland buying a few motors cheap?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Then it’s me that’s got something to tell you.’

  ‘Right, let’s hear.’

  ‘I been thinking. Thinking about when those ballroom doors opened that night. And finally I remembered. I heard that sorta screech the door made. And then I did see, for definite, who came out of there.’

  ‘All right, say the name, though I’ve a pretty good idea what it’ll be.’

  ‘Bubsy Willson.’

  ‘Yes, Bubsy Willson. Thank you, Syd. That may be the final proof I need. Or as much proof as I’m likely ever to get. After thirty long years and with no DNA to help.’

  Abruptly into her head there popped the sight of bloated, slummocky ex-Detective Sergeant Shaddock. The man who, she wryly remembered now, had told her to look for the one who found the body. Old rule. So, it seemed as if he had got it right. The dreadful old soak.

  *

  ‘Yet, all the same,’ Harriet said to John some time after supper that evening, ‘despite having evidence from two witnesses that it was Bubsy who came out of that fantastic empty ballroom thirty-plus years ago and shouted out that the Boy was dead, despite all that’s implied by that, more than implied, I’m still not altogether happy that she strangled him.’

  ‘Because it’s possible she did no more than find him lying there, strangled?’

  Harriet sat frowning, the book she had been trying to read, John’s copy of Edward Lear, flopped on to her lap.

  ‘Well, no,’ she said at last, with wholly uncharacteristic indecision, ‘no, it’s not that. Or I don’t think it is.’

  ‘But it could be that, you know. Logically. And just think what defence counsel would make of the possibility. If, after all this time, it comes to a trial.’

  ‘Right. And I’ve considered it. Believe me I have. But I honestly think a defence of that sort wouldn’t really stand up. Of course, it’s possible, logically possible, that one of the others entered the ballroom before Bubsy did. But nothing that I’ve heard from the surviving witnesses makes me believe anyone did. And, more to the point, nothing old DCI Kenworthy got out of those witnesses at the time led him to believe anyone had been seen entering the ballroom.’

  ‘Not even Bubsy,’ John put in. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t forgotten that. I’ve forgotten nothing, and I know I could go to Mr Newcomen tomorrow, as I really think I shall have to, and tell him in all truth that there’s a good case for Barbara Willson, now Mrs Brownlow, to have been the murderer of the Boy Preacher. And, God, how pleased he’ll be with that. A trial, more than thirty years after the murder was committed, and such a murder, too. What a picture he’ll be able to paint of the newly directed Greater Birchester Police.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Yes. How well you know me. Yes, there is a but. I think it really comes down to this. I cannot for the life of me understand why that terrible sloppy girl, all those years ago, would have wanted to end the Boy Preacher’s life. If I could imagine the slightest, feeblest reason why ... Oh, I know the prosecution never has to present evidence of motive unless it wishes to, just the facts that will secure a guilty verdict. But only if I knew why Bubsy needed to kill the Boy could I go happily to Mr Newcomen and let him have his triumph.’

  ‘Happily? Really?’

  John grinned at her.

  ‘All right, not happily, if you like. But in all sincerity, knowing I was simply putting the truth in front of him. To maul about, as he liked, like a puppy with a rag doll.’

  ‘And you can’t think of any reason, however unlikely, however bizarre, for Bubsy to have strangled the Boy?�
�

  ‘Right, bizarre. If that means totally illogical, gone right round the twist, then, yes, she could have had a bizarre reason, or unreason. But, no. No one has ever suggested that she was behaving, either before the murder or after, in any such fashion. And that, again, includes DCI Kenworthy, whose judgment I’d certainly trust.’

  ‘Well, I can see why you want some sort of a motive, however obscure, before you feel satisfied,’ John conceded.

  ‘But you? You know as much as I do about the inquiry now, or nearly as much. What do you think? What motive could Bubsy Willson have had for killing the Boy that night?’

  John, now, sat in silence. And at last spoke.

  ‘No, I can’t see it any more than you can. Why should that decidedly unattractive, rather simple girl have committed such a savage murder? Because, after all, that’s what it was. Savage.’

  ‘Yes, and how Mr Newbroom will love that.’

  ‘No, forget Mr Newbroom. Think of Bubsy. Bubsy, and why should she have done that.’

  ‘But, damn it all, I have thought, thought and thought. If you’ve no better advice than that, you’d better go back to your book and I’ll go back to mine. If I can concentrate at all on it, good though it is.’

  John looked at her, head shaking with mock sadness.

  ‘Well, I do have some advice for you actually,’ he said, glancing down at his watch. It’s this: early though it is, go to bed. La nuit porte conseil.’

  Harriet glared back at him.

  ‘And I’ve got some advice for you,’ she snapped. ‘It’s this: just for once don’t preach at your wife. And especially not in a foreign language.’

  ‘And don’t you play the Hard Detective with me,’ John shot back, caught on the raw.

  They sat there, books on their laps, tension crackling across the gap between them.

  And dissolving.

  No calculating which of them laughed first. But it was Harriet who said, ‘All right, I will go to bed. Tell you the truth, I’m utterly worn out.’